El Corazón Es Un Músculo (The Heart Is a Muscle)

I used to think that France was the most food-obsessed nation on earth. Then I moved to Peru.

Life halts twice a day in France for the gastronomic liturgies of le déjeuner and le dîner. Then the French people refold their napkins and return to the all-consuming business of being French: ie., being frighteningly exact about money, arguing about philosophy and literature, and dressing better than everyone else except the Italians.

Here in Peru, however, food consciousness–preparing, eating, talking, thinking about food–goes on 24/7. Peruvians discuss food with a singular intensity and concentration — and I mean all Peruvians, all the time. I sometimes believe that you could wake a Peruvian from a dead sleep, and in less than two minutes he’d be up to a serious food conversation.

I’ve seen Peruvian businessmen standing on line for a table at Punto Azul engaged in a half-hour dispute over whether Ecuador’s ceviche is the real thing. (As a point of comparison: Can you imagine two U.S. executives on a business lunch talking about food for more than two minutes?) I’ve braved an hour-long car ride to a burial where the mourners spoke exclusively of where to eat after the service. (The deceased was a beloved tia, by the way.)  I’ve been lectured at by an elderly fruit salesman on Av. Benavides as to why Peru’s mangoes are the best in the world, a topic that is apparently worthy of a master’s thesis.

And then there is El Piloto.

Among El Fotografo’s relatives in Lima is a cousin whose husband flies commercial jets for LanPeru. Regardless of the country they’re from, professional pilots tend to be even-tempered people with good eyesight who talk about their kids, their car, the weather, sports. That’s true of most pilots in Peru, but mention the words “pasta” or “lúcuma” to them, and their inner Peruvian foodie explodes to the surface.

Particularly El Piloto, a compact man with a resonant voice who embodies the word “gusto.”

Two months ago at a family almuerzo, El Piloto was determined that I should be 100 percent in agreement that Peru has the best Italian food on the planet. I tried to argue that the best Italian food is in Italy — I’ve tasted it, I know — but El Piloto pooh-poohed that banal conceit.

“La comida italiana en Peru es la mas rica del mundo!” he thundered at me happily across la mesa. (My disagreeing seemed to invigorate him.)

“Por que las verduras peruanas son mas frescas,” he went on, turning to his brother-in-law (a former pilot, it turns out, but one more subdued than El Piloto).

Yes, yes, the two pilots concurred. The vegetables in Peru smell better, taste better. The ground is fertile, the farmers know how to work the land….

Actually, I agree that much of Peru’s produce is exceptional. What kept me from chiming in that afternoon was my inability to match my relatives’ enormous enthusiasm for this topic. Not to mention their conversational stamina.

I left the table, poured myself a glass of red wine, wandered into a library where the kids were playing video games, watched Mario beat Luigi twice in a race and came back to the dining table more than 40 minutes later. The pilots were still at it:

“Pero la pasta en Peru es buenasa!”

I ran into El Piloto again last Friday night at a birthday party for his eight-year-old son. He was aflame with the news that Gaston Acurio has opened a new anticucho restaurant at Av. Dos de Mayo, in Miraflores.

“Imagine this,” he told me in Spanish. “An anticucho platter for two. For only 18 soles!” (Americans: divide by 3 and you get the approximate cost in U.S. dollars. Europeans: one Peruvian sol = approx. 0.25 euros.)

“What’s wrong?” he asked, when he saw that I wasn’t excited about Panchita. “Don’t you like anticuchos?”

I confessed that I don’t eat cow’s heart.

“But it is delicious, more than steak!” He furrowed his brow. “You haven’t even tried it, have you?”

No, I admitted. I don’t want to eat the heart of any animal.

You have to get over that, he pressed. Look, you eat steak, right? That’s a muscle. Well….”el corazón es un músculo tambien!”

El Piloto made a fist and opened and closed it rapidly, like a heart beating.

“El corazón es un músculo!” he repeated, pumping his hand at me. 

“Right? Isn’t it true?” he nudged El Fotografo. “So why not eat it?”

I kept looking at El Piloto’s hand throbbing like a crazy músculo. A strange idea occured to me.

“I’m going to have a t-shirt made for you in Gamarra,” I told him. ” El corazón es un músculo.’ Right across the chest. It’s a good message.”

“Si, El corazón es un músculo: cuidate [look after it],” added his sister-in-law. “And add a picture of the hand. With blinking lights!” 

The heart is a muscle. This is what Peruvians are teaching me.

Well, perhaps it is okay for some people to eat this muscle. For now, I prefer just to exercise mine — metaphorically. By developing compassion.

What does El Piloto’s statement El corazón es un músculo suggest to you?

–Barbara R. Drake